Society has greatly benefited from the many advances in medical knowledge, pharmaceutical drugs, and patient treatments. Despite all these advances, a significant challenge facing the medical field are prescription errors. Prescription errors, due primarily to poor handwriting, are a leading cause of medical errors which lead to injuries and/or fatalities. Currently, when a patient goes to a pharmacy to receive a prescribed drug, the pharmacist often has to read and rely on illegible prescriptions when filling out a particular patient's prescription. This significantly increases the odds that an incorrect drug will be given to the patient. The pharmacist may be able to call the physician directly to verify the prescription, however, often times the physician may be unavailable to communicate with the pharmacist.
In order to more effectively fulfill the healthcare community's obligations to a patient, it is very important to be able to ensure that a patient actually receives what a physician prescribed for the patient's health condition. When patients receive the wrong medications it leads to problems such as health-related complications resulting from taking the wrong medications, decreased trust in the medical system, increased costs, and unnecessary expenditures of healthcare resources. As a result, there is a need for a more effective, efficient, and accurate means of reducing prescription errors through the use of systems and methods for bi-translation of speech and writing so as to verify the accuracy of prescriptions.